Escape Velocity's Demo is live/Next Fest Announcement
Happy spooky month friends. It's my favorite time of the year, as I'm sure you may have assumed. So you can bet that once that clock hit midnight and it became October, I was ready to upload something special for ya'll.
That's right. Siren's Call: Escape Velocity will be participating in this month's Steam Next Fest. Which means...you guys get a free demo of the commercial release. You can find it here!
See you all on the 9th.
We are less than 8% away from funding Siren's Call: Escape Velocity.
That's right everyone. This is closer to happening than ever before. To everybody that has pledged so far, thank you so much for taking the time to do so. It helps us keep making games more than anything else. To everyone interested in pledging that hasn't done so, you can help us get there by going to our kickstarter here!!
Until next time, stay cool everyone!
~Jacob
Siren's Call: Escape Velocity is now 66% funded!
Our game is very close to being fully funded, but we need the support of each and every one of you to help make this dream a reality. Please click here or search "Siren's Call: Escape Velocity Kickstarter" online to find our campaign and offer your support. We legit cannot do this without your help.
You can also sign up to get some cool exclusive merch as well as the game early. So don't miss out!
~Jacob
The Siren's Call Kickstarter is now live!
The time has come! The moment we have been working towards for over a year!
If you are even remotely interested in our project, this kickstarter is the best way to support it.
In fact, for the next two days, every tier is discounted by 5$ So if you want to pre-order the game for cheap AND get your name in credits, this is an easy way to make that happen. ;)
This only happens with YOUR help! So in advance, thank you for your interest in this little game of ours. It means more than I can ever articulate.
I love you all.
Jacob
The Siren's Call Kickstarter is now live!
The time has come! The moment we have been working towards for over a year!
If you are even remotely interested in our project, this kickstarter is the best way to support it.
In fact, for the next two days, every tier is discounted by 5$ So if you want to pre-order the game for cheap AND get your name in credits, this is an easy way to make that happen. ;)
This only happens with YOUR help! So in advance, thank you for your interest in this little game of ours. I means more than I can ever articulate.
I love you all.
Jacob
Siren's Call: Escape Velocity- Dev Log #4: New post-game features and more!
Hey there friends, Jacob here! It's the 15th of the month again, and this time, I thought I'd go over some of the new post-game content I just finished programming, as well as some new features that tie nicely into that content. Let's get right to it!
The new timeline menu lets you experience the game your way!
Along with the journal and gallery you all are familiar with, Siren's Call: Escape Velocity will also feature a simple timeline menu highlighting the key events for Oliver's main story, the Finishing Touches, AND Prove You Aren't Dead (more on that one later). Basically, whenever you complete the game once, this menu will unlock and can be accessed from the title screen. Then, upon completing more scenes in the post-game and going for more endings, the timeline will update accordingly.
Much like Oliver's Journal, this new menu exists to add greater context to the events of the game as a whole, without exactly beating players over the head with that context. Like the journal, this timeline is completely optional to engage with for that reason. Confused or curious players can refer back to this like an index of sorts to get a bigger picture of what's going on, but it's not mandatory. Our goal is to make your experience with Siren's Call as deep as you want it to be, so if you're feeling lost at any point once the credits roll, give this new menu a shot! Or maybe visit it after 100%-ing the game to see if what's in your head matches up with reality. Or maybe you'll notice something new all together if you stare long enough... ;)
Prove You Aren't Dead- a mini VN that changes everything.
This is the big one. As of this time, I have officially completed writing and programming Violet's chapter of the game: Prove You Aren't Dead (called PYAD from this point on). While the aspects of the game will change with feedback and such, I'm feeling pretty damn great about how this turned out. And I hope all of you will enjoy what Violet's POV brings to the table.
Upon getting the main game's true ending, PYAD will unlock along with the rest of the game's post content. While I'm not going to be giving away any major story details here, what I CAN say is that Violet handles stressful situations with Judith MUCH differently than her boyfriend does. So how will the two of them bounce off each other as a category 6 hurricane is rolling into Siren's Call? Will they be able to weather out this storm? Or will their inability to see eye to eye be the death of them all?
I'm just so happy this story is going to get to be told. PYAD was one of the main pieces of content I simply didn't have the time or money needed to put in the prototype version of the game and I feel it really brings Oliver, Violet and Judith's arcs together in a fantastic way. I think it's also the perfect reward for those that are tenacious enough to find the game's true ending. Honestly, I'm so excited to see what everybody thinks of it, but alas, we must wait. I promise it will be worth it though.
Kickstarter updates
We are officially one month away from the Kickstarter launching! Dev log #3 goes over everything that entails a little bit more, but I will say that the dakimarura artist as well as all the physical merch production has been finalized. This is going to be a big event, so if you haven't signed up for launch notifications, please do so here! It helps more than you can even imagine, and this (in conjunction with leaving a good review on our steam page <3) is the best way to help make this game the best it can be.
Art update
Ray is hard at work on the CG for THAT moment with Violet on the beach. It should be done soon, but for those of you that know, you know.
So be sure to be nice and let Oliver go, okay? After all, who could say no to that face?
Also, all the discord requested maid CGs are done. While I won't show all of them here, I do think Emil's eagerness to crossdress is something to be admired.
The dude is #1 in my heart.
Any who, that's all I have for now! I'll give you guys more news as things progress, so until then, stay cool.
Siren's Call: Escape Velocity- Dev Log #3: Voice actor/kickstarter date reveal!
Hey there everybody! Jacob here! We've had some exciting stuff happen sense last month, so let's get right to it!
Art update!
First, before we get into the really big announcements, we have some art that has been completed! Raeis finished up not one, but TWO new CGs for the opening section of the game. This first one is for when you end up visiting Judith a bit earlier than she expected. And this second one...
...this second one might be my favorite CG in the game. New potential cover art? We shall see.
The VAs have been decided!
After a month of auditions and lots of great takes, my team and I have decided on who will be voicing each character if the kickstarter is successful! It's really exciting to have something like this on the table, so without further delay, here is our talent!
As Oliver, we have cast Charles Nguyễn!
As Violet, we have cast Estelle Son!
As Judith, we have cast Phebe Fabacher
As Ashton, we have cast Bradley Gareth
As Andi, we have cast Maganda Marie
As Emil, we have cast Grant Paulsen
And finally, we have cast Savvi Lee as Miss Lawrence
This is a really exciting opportunity to bring the story of Siren's Call to life even more. We have decided that voice acting will be the main focus of the upcoming kickstarter, as we feel its inclusion will really help give the scenes it's in a bit more punch. Which brings me to my next announcement...
Escape Velocity's kickstarter begins September 15th!!!
That's right! In two months, we are launching our kickstarter campaign. We still need a bit more time to spread the word and finalize some aspects of the page, but now that the voice auditions are done and the cast has been selected, I feel confident in setting this date in stone. Here's a few things you can expect from the reward tiers:
*Dakimakuras of any character pairing you desire
*Physical copies of Oliver's journal, Judith's cookbook, and much more
*Beta access that lets you play the game long before anybody else
*Oliver's T-shirt in the size of your choosing
+AND LOADS MORE!!!
For more kickstarter updates, please follow me either on twitter or follow the kickstarter's prelaunch page here. We've got lots more to reveal, and with your help, you can make this game the best it can possibly be! I legit cannot do this without your help, so if this project interests you at all, please consider giving these pages a follow.
Anywho, that's about all I got for now! I'll give you guys more news as things progress, so until then, stay cool.
Yours and stuck in Florida forever, Jacob
Siren's Call: Escape Velocity- Dev Log #2: Our steam/kickstarter page is LIVE!!!
Hey there everybody, Jacob here. A LOT has happened since our last dev log, so let's just get right into the juicy stuff, shall we?
Both the game's new steam page and the game's upcoming kickstarter are now live!
The steam page is here and the kickstarter page is right here! Both got approved the first time I requested it, which is honestly nuts to me. Seriously, when I was trying to get the steam page for the prototype version of the game up (the version ya'll are familiar with), it took 5 attempts. It was hell. Thankfully, things went smooth this time. You're gonna hear me promote these pages and beg ya'll to follow, wishlist, and subscribe to them a lot for a couple of reasons...
These metrics, such as wishlists and kickstarter follows and such, help give me and the rest of the team an idea of how big the launch is going to be. More groundswell means more features for the final release, such as voice acting, more translations, and even more story content on top of the new content we're adding. This is true not only for the kickstarter, but also for the steam page. After hitting certain metrics (10,000 wishlists being the big one) Steam starts showing the game to a LOT more people. Which works out great for everyone. So please, hit every button on these pages. Wishlisting is free. Following the kickstarter is free. So please press the buttons. The future of the project quite literately depends on it.
We also have a casting call on-going for the game's voice acting!
That's right! Depending on how well Escape Velocity's kickstarter goes, the game is going to have VOICE ACTING. Partial voice acting, sure, but all the most important scenes (in my opinion) will be voice acted. We might be able to get full voice acting if we can find a publisher (that's still not going well, lol), but for now, we're focusing on the kickstarter, because that's something we can realistically achieve. If you or anybody you know is interested in trying out for a role, you can scope out the competition/apply here! Check out and see if you can guess who the team is thinking of for each role. ;) Seriously, there is some real talent that has auditioned and maybe even a few names ya'll will recognize...
Raies' CG grind continues!
In addition to the new art of Judith greeting you at the door, another CG of her is in the works. This will likely be her last one for the opening act, with Violet coming up next. Yeah, there's gonna be a LOT more CGs in the first chapter, so get excited. :) Here's a preview on the one Ray is currently working on.
I think the oven mitts are adorable, personally.
About the 500 review goal for the game...
So I did promise I would talk about this more in the last dev log. Essentially, the reason I'm focusing so much on the kickstarter, steam, social media and all that stuff funnels back to one thing: Steam Reviews. It's no secret that having your game on the steam marketplace is costly as a developer (with steam taking around 25% of the total profits your game makes last time I checked). Thankfully, they DO market your game really intensely if it crosses certain thresholds. The first is having over 10,000 wishlists before you launch. The second is...of course...having steam reviews. And I mean a LOT of steam reviews.
TLDR: Once your game hits over 10 reviews, steam essentially knows it's not shovelware and starts showing it to more people. This continues at the 50 and 500 review benchmarks, with 500 reviews putting you in such a high percent of steam's games overall that they do a huge bulk of the marketing on the storefront for you.
For indie games with almost no marketing power like ours, this is a dream come true and the main appeal of the platform...and the most reliable way to secure the means to make more games. So, while the rest of the game's assets are being finished, securing those 500 reviews in the first couple days of the game's official launch is going to be everything. We already know we have a great experience on our hands, but getting people to not only know about it, but also review it, is going to be the main battle. So far with the prototype version, we're only at 176 reviews, so clearly we can't just do what we did last time again and call it a day. So I'm thinking of giving out 1000 review copies of the commercial release to anybody I know is willing to leave a helpful review.
It will be closer to the final release of the game when I give out review copies, but I'm fairly certain I can give them out to anybody. Still, I gotta know they're willing to leave a review in the first place, which is tricky to discern, but reaching out to people that have already left a review on the prototype version is one way I'm thinking about doing that. Steam might not let me do that though. I don't know; this is all just me spitballing anyway, and if anybody has any better ideas to reach that goal (asking Markiplier is not an idea; no influencers have returned my emails), then I'm super open to hear them.
Anywho, that's about all I got for now! I'll give you guys more news as things progress, so until then, stay cool.
Yours and stuck in Florida forever, Jacob
Siren's Call: Escape Velocity- Dev Log #1
Hey there everybody! Jacob here with some updates about the game that ya'll may find interesting. Some pretty cool stuff has been happening since my last post on here, so I thought it might be fun to give everybody the details.
The German translation for the game has officially begun!
And not only that, but we've got the entire first chapter translated! Thanks to the hard work of Pan over in the discord, I've been given a lot to work with. Which is great, because between waiting for the rest of the art to finish and completing the script as a whole, I've been itching to get back to some programming. VNMaker has its problems, sure, but actually plugging the translations into the script has been an absolute breeze. It's a little time consuming, because text has to be shifted and certain parts of the UI have to be reprogrammed to accommodate for longer German sentences, but it's not difficult (for context, plugging in the script and adding the lines of code that pace the dialogue properly took me about 5 days with Blue Skies Ahead-- the game's first chapter).
I was definitely worried that the translation process would manifest some new bugs for the game...somehow...but thankfully this seems like it was just me being paranoid. So yes, German Siren's Call is happening and it's fitting into the game's code great so far! Expect more to come.
New art is in the works!
In addition to the new art of Andi up above, Ray is also in the process of making another new CG for the start of the game-- this time for when Oliver meets with Judith alone for the first time! She's a little surprised to seem him this early, it seems. Everything he's made for the game has been freaking awesome, but I'm especially looking forward to this CG because it's gonna be the first big hint that Judith...might not be everything she seems.
I think it'll be a really fun moment for people playing the game for the first time.
Also, maid outfits may or may not be in the works. Maybe. Almost definitely (blame the discord for this one).
Major bugs for the game have been fixed!
The game takes a bit longer to load at the start now, but everything else runs smooth as butter. It's still way higher in terms of RAM usage than the average VN, but I've gotten no frame rate complaints from my play testers so far, so that's a HUGE step forward. It still doesn't do great on anything with less than 4gb of ram when multiple applications are open, but most people probably aren't rocking hardware like that these days so I don't think it's worth it to switch to renpy at this point (especially if the translation programming process is gonna take as long as I think it will).
Essentially, there were a few common events (little nuggets of code that run in the background) that weren't terminating when they were supposed to. Those common events now either A) don't exist anymore due to no longer being needed or B) have been baked into the main script itself so that they terminate upon the player completing the scene. A simple fix, sure, but an effective one. Sadly, the bulk of the ram usage seems to be directly tied to how many different music tracks are set to play in a scene...which smells like VNMaker not optimizing its audio code properly. So short of reaching out to the devs for a fix, I don't think there's much I can do to deal with that, but a few optimizations I've made and the common event bug fix has smoothed things out considerably. So that's nice.
There was also one bug that was crashing saves that were made when certain lines of text were fading out (namely when people get an "item" or unlock a gallery image). I guess the game couldn't handle reloading in the middle of the more complex animations. Now, the common event in charge of that is set to terminate upon clicking the settings buttons, and erase the text with it. I'm pretty sure most of the load game crashes are the result of saves being made in the middle of the complex animations, so I'll be on the hunt for as many of those as possible during my translation adventures. Here's hoping to no more crashed saves!
I wanna go to a convention and give out macarons.
Imma be honest, I'm a very very very very shy person. But you can't be shy and have a successful visual novel so...yeah...I'm gonna have to do something if I want this game to reach 500 reviews (more on why that's important in a future update I guess).
I've been looking into anime conventions in central Florida that my wife and I can potentially booth at. I know this really doesn't seem like "dev log" stuff, but I feel like if I JUST focus on the game itself at this point, and not marketing, I'm kinda shooting myself in the foot, along with anybody else that has faith in this project/wants it to succeed. So I'm gonna try and get out of my shell a bit! It'll probs be closer to the game's release, but I think it could be a fun way to get the word out. This is something I have essentially no experience with (I've gone to anime cons in the past before, but never as a dev), but I'll keep everybody updated either here and/or on my twitter if things become official.
Anywho, that's about all I got for now! I'll give you guys more news as things progress, so until then, stay cool.
Yours and stuck in Florida forever, Jacob
Siren's Call: Escape Velocity- Dev Log #1
Hey there everybody! Jacob here with some updates about the game that ya'll may find interesting. Some pretty cool stuff has been happening since my last post on here, so I thought it might be fun to give everybody the details.
The German translation for the game has officially begun!
And not only that, but we've got the entire first chapter translated! Thanks to the hard work of Pan over in the discord, I've been given a lot to work with. Which is great, because between waiting for the rest of the art to finish and completing the script as a whole, I've been itching to get back to some programming. VNMaker has its problems, sure, but actually plugging the translations into the script has been an absolute breeze. It's a little time consuming, because text has to be shifted and certain parts of the UI have to be reprogrammed to accommodate for longer German sentences, but it's not difficult (for context, plugging in the script and adding the lines of code that pace the dialogue properly took me about 5 days with Blue Skies Ahead-- the game's first chapter).
I was definitely worried that the translation process would manifest some new bugs for the game...somehow...but thankfully this seems like it was just me being paranoid. So yes, German Siren's Call is happening and it's fitting into the game's code great so far! Expect more to come.
New art is in the works!
In addition to the new art of Andi up above, Ray is also in the process of making another new CG for the start of the game-- this time for when Oliver meets with Judith alone for the first time! She's a little surprised to seem him this early, it seems. Everything he's made for the game has been freaking awesome, but I'm especially looking forward to this CG because it's gonna be the first big hint that Judith...might not be everything she seems.
I think it'll be a really fun moment for people playing the game for the first time.
Also, maid outfits may or may not be in the works. Maybe. Almost definitely (blame the discord for this one).
Major bugs for the game have been fixed!
The game takes a bit longer to load at the start now, but everything else runs smooth as butter. It's still way higher in terms of RAM usage than the average VN, but I've gotten no frame rate complaints from my play testers so far, so that's a HUGE step forward. It still doesn't do great on anything with less than 4gb of ram when multiple applications are open, but most people probably aren't rocking hardware like that these days so I don't think it's worth it to switch to renpy at this point (especially if the translation programming process is gonna take as long as I think it will).
Essentially, there were a few common events (little nuggets of code that run in the background) that weren't terminating when they were supposed to. Those common events now either A) don't exist anymore due to no longer being needed or B) have been baked into the main script itself so that they terminate upon the player completing the scene. A simple fix, sure, but an effective one. Sadly, the bulk of the ram usage seems to be directly tied to how many different music tracks are set to play in a scene...which smells like VNMaker not optimizing its audio code properly. So short of reaching out to the devs for a fix, I don't think there's much I can do to deal with that, but a few optimizations I've made and the common event bug fix has smoothed things out considerably. So that's nice.
There was also one bug that was crashing saves that were made when certain lines of text were fading out (namely when people get an "item" or unlock a gallery image). I guess the game couldn't handle reloading in the middle of the more complex animations. Now, the common event in charge of that is set to terminate upon clicking the settings buttons, and erase the text with it. I'm pretty sure most of the load game crashes are the result of saves being made in the middle of the complex animations, so I'll be on the hunt for as many of those as possible during my translation adventures. Here's hoping to no more crashed saves!
I wanna go to a convention and give out macarons.
Imma be honest, I'm a very very very very shy person. But you can't be shy and have a successful visual novel so...yeah...I'm gonna have to do something if I want this game to reach 500 reviews (more on why that's important in a future update I guess).
I've been looking into anime conventions in central Florida that my wife and I can potentially booth at. I know this really doesn't seem like "dev log" stuff, but I feel like if I JUST focus on the game itself at this point, and not marketing, I'm kinda shooting myself in the foot, along with anybody else that has faith in this project/wants it to succeed. So I'm gonna try and get out of my shell a bit! It'll probs be closer to the game's release, but I think it could be a fun way to get the word out. This is something I have essentially no experience with (I've gone to anime cons in the past before, but never as a dev), but I'll keep everybody updated either here and/or on my twitter if things become official.
Anywho, that's about all I got for now! I'll give you guys more news as things progress, so until then, stay cool.
